In conventional 2D digital photography, an image of a scene may be captured as a 2D matrix of color values that represents the scene from one field of view. The focus depth and Center of Perspective (CoP) of the image typically cannot be changed after the image has been captured; rather, the focus depth and Center of Perspective at the time of image capture determine what features are in focus and in view. Accordingly, there is also no way to modify the viewpoint from which an image is taken.
One repercussion of this limitation is that it may be difficult to carry out image stabilization. Since true image stabilization would require adjustment of the viewpoint from which the image or video was captured, conventional 2D image stabilization methods are typically limited to lossy processes that can only compensate for 2D shifts within an image sequence. The need to crop portions of the image to correct the 2D shifts results in loss of image data.